Posting through Bluetooth and My New Treo 650

With three sales tax free days, some free time to get accustomed to a new device, and a dying Treo 600, I finally bit the bullet and just bought the Treo 650. This means that I can now use my phone as a modem over Bluetooth, and I get a connection speed of around 75 kbps according to 2wire. This is phenomenal, as it means that I don’t need to find a WiFi connection for basics like e-mail, blogging, and reading blogs as long as my phone has a connection.

Even though some of that stuff can be done from the phone itself (which is totally sweet, by the way) it’s nice when available to use my PowerBook instead. It has a 1440×900 17″ wide screen and a full-sized keyboard. This is definitely not the case with the Treo.

The camera seems to be much better than on the Treo 600. It works much better in low light situations. The Treo 600 camera was basically useless unless you were outside in broad daylight.

Here’s a picture I snapped of some graffiti in New Orleans:

Someone's tagging with my name!

It seems there’s an thug artist who shares my name in the city.

As you may have inferred from the title, this post and the upload of the photo have been done using my Treo’s connection over Bluetooth. I happen to think that’s pretty cool.

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Katrina/New Orleans Guest Blogger

I was recently approached by someone I know about guest-blogging on VirtuallyShocking.com with posts regarding New Orleans’ recovery from Hurricane Katrina. His first guest post is here. Please see his disclaimers about whose views belong to whom and so on.

I had meant to post with an intro before he posted anything, but I was driving back to Louisiana from St.Louis yesterday, so it didn’t happen. So now you know — noone hacked my blog. He is a welcome guest.

I’ll have more info and posts later, but I haven’t unpacked any of my stuff yet, so it’ll have to wait till then.

Are Republicans hiding what they did post-Katrina?

[Brock has kindly allowed me to occasionally guest on his blog on the topic of New Orleans post-Katrina. My views, of course, are not Brock’s, as his comments will no doubt indicate from time to time. Kodjo]

The Republican dominated House committee investigating the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina quickly requested and received virtually everything written from the Democratic governor of the state Louisiana. This information was made public on December 2nd.[1]

In contrast, the White House is stonewalling[2] and the House committee has, to date, not pressed the issue. Similarly, little information has been supplied by the Republican governors of Alabama and Mississippi.[3]

The House committee has finally decided to subpoena the Pentagon, who “said it had lost the committee-issued request for memos, e-mail messages and other documents related to the military’s response to the worst natural disaster in U.S. history”.[4] Don’t worry. They run a good war.

[1] Bill Walsh and Laura Maggi, Blanco defends actions in storm, She releases blizzard of papers depicting her decisive, frustrated, Times-Picayune, Saturday, December 03, 2005

[2] David E. Rosenbaum, Fight in House for White House Files on Katrina, New York Times, December 8, 2005

[3] Bill Walsh, Demo wants Bush team subpoenas, He seeks a timeline of post-storm actions, Times-Picayune, Wednesday, December 14, 2005

[4] Bill Walsh, Katrina panel subpoenas Rumsfeld, Pentagon says it lost document request, The Times-Picayune, Thursday, December 14, 2005

[This spiel was originally posted on Catallaxy, where I occasionally appear as the token liberal.]

When it’s all said and done…

When it’s all said and done,
It’s real and it’s been fun,
But was it all real fun?

–Greenday

It was fun, for the most part. Most labs spend a lot of time together. Not many of them cohabitate for the better part of a semester. It could have been awful, but it was mostly rockin’. Thanks guys, and so long St.Louis. I finally saw the arch today, from afar.

I should probably write a longer post about this later. Off to bed.

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Adobe Acrobat Stupidity

I’m filling out a fellowship application that requires the use of Adobe Acrobat, and the free reader won’t cut it. I had been using a computer in Dr.Rudy’s lab, running Win XP, that had Adobe Acrobat Pro installed. Unfortunately, I’m not done filling it out yet, and I am leaving for NOLA tomorrow bright and early.

Therefore, I had to go buy Adobe Acrobat for Mac. I opted not to get the professional version. It cost $100 at the educational pricing level. It’s bad enough that I should have to fork out cash for this when a simple web form would have been just fine, but it gets worse.

It wouldn’t run. Nothing. Not run and quit. Double-click-then-nothing. I was pretty sure that I knew what the problem was right away: they assumed that my filesystem wasn’t case sensitive, and were accordingly careless in writing the program. When installing OS X v. 10.4 (Tiger), it’s possible to choose a case-sensitive HFS+ filesystem, rather than the standard non-case-sensitive HFS+. I chose case-sensitive, because I normally work with case-sensitive filesystems in Linux, and there have been times in the past where I had collisions — files that were named the same thing except where case differed, and transferring those files to Mac OS X had been a mess.

Luckily, I was able to figure out what the problem was. I ran the program from the command line, and discovered from the error message that the program was looking for AdobeBIBUtils.framework. The file that existed was AdobeBibUtils.framework. The difference is just the case in IB vs ib. I renamed the directory. The program then launched, but crashed moments later looking for AdobeBibUtils.framework. They had used two differently-cased names in the same program.

I just symlinked one name to the other, and now the program runs without a problem. Adobe has something about this problem on their support site. Their solution? Install it on a non-case-sensitive HFS+ filesystem. For many people this means reformatting their hard drive and reinstalling everything. That’s a great solution to Adobe’s shitty coding. There may be a few more of these spelling land-mines in the software. I guess I’ll have to find and fix them as I go along. How absurd.

Guess what, Adobe? It took 30 seconds to fix the problem. I suggest you take care of it on your end. I can’t believe I paid money for this.

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